Suzy Rothfield Thompson ’72 started taking violin lessons at age 7. “I did not enjoy it,” she said recently from Berkeley, Calif., as she was enjoying a walk. “Dreaded it, in fact. The teacher I had was very old-school, and the lessons were all about not making a mistake, and you can’t make music that way.” 

All these years later Suzy not only is a fine fiddler but plays the guitar and sings. Blues. Cajun. Folk. Bluegrass. Old-time fiddle tunes. American roots music. Suzy figured out a way to make music, all right, despite her first teacher. 

“I had no idea you could play anything other than classical music on the violin,” Suzy said. “I just didn't know that existed, and my teacher had nothing but disdain for anything except for classical music.” 

When she was 10, Suzy saw a kid playing a guitar, “and I thought that was cool.” She asked her mom to buy her a guitar and basically taught herself. In junior high school she started to go to a summer camp in Vermont run by Mike Cohen, who was in the Shanty Boys. Mike’s brother, John, was in the old-time string band the New Lost City Ramblers. Some of those records were at the camp. 

“I heard the records, and I heard the fiddling, and I said, ‘Oh my, you can have violin in folk music.’ I was ignorant. I had no idea,” she recalled. “There was a violin there. A lot of people played music there, banjo and guitar. I picked up the violin. I always had a good ear, and I started playing along, and it was so much fun. I think what attracted me to it even more than the music was the social aspect of it. It was a way to be with other people.” 

When Suzy graduated from Chaffee, she didn’t feel ready for college. She yearned for the folk scene and ended up in Berkeley, Calif., where she lives today.  

When asked what music has given her, she paused. “How do I even begin to answer that?” she said. “So many people in my life have come into it through music, and I’ve gotten to travel, and not just travel, because when you travel to places and are genuinely interested in the music there and have made the effort to try to learn and understand the music, you get invited into people’s homes and get to see the way people live in a way you never would as just a tourist. That is one of the coolest things I’ve gotten to do. And I’ve been able to play music with a lot of my heroes.  And I have this Berkeley, California, life in a big, old rundown house with people coming and going constantly.” 

Suzy and her husband, Eric, a renowned flatpicking guitarist, have played together for more than 50 years. And one of the places they ventured to in the mid-1970s was Cajun country in Louisiana, back before Cajun music was well-known outside of Louisiana. They might end up at a party miles down a backcountry dirt road or in the middle of a field somewhere or in someone’s home. The lure was such that Suzy kept coming back, receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 to work with Cajun musicians and in 1983 forming the California Cajun Orchestra, one of the many bands in which she has performed. In September she will once again direct the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention, a festival she founded in 2003. She also was artistic director of Festival of American Fiddle Tunes from 2010 to 2016. 

Suzy’s musical journey recently came full circle. When she was 20 years old, she sang some of Paul Siebel’s songs, but her career took her in a different direction than his style of music. Mr. Siebel was an American folk rock singer/songwriter who made two albums for Elektra in the early 1970s. “I stopped performing the songs — but I never forgot the songs,” Suzy said. “When COVID came around [in 2020], I found myself late at night, after everyone had gone to bed, sitting in the living room with the lights off and playing the guitar, and I found myself coming back to those songs.” 

The pandemic forced musicians to stop performing live. Suzy performed songs from Mr. Siebel and Randy Newman online. “That went well,” she said. “A lot of people tuned in. So I decided to do [an online concert] on Paul Siebel’s first album in the order of the songs.” 

Suzy had never met him. Soon after recording his two albums, Mr. Siebel stopped writing songs and performing. By the 1980s he had left the music business. He "started drinking, things started coming apart,” he said in a 2011 interview with American Songwriter magazine.  

Mr. Siebel died in 2022. The New York Times obit began: “Paul Siebel, a folk singer and songwriter who drew comparisons to Bob Dylan in the 1960s and 1970s but dropped out of the music business, hindered by stage fright and disappointed by the lack of attention his work received, died on April 5 in hospice care in Centreville, Md. He was 84.” 

But he heard Suzy sing his songs before he died. 

“Somehow, and I still don’t know how this happened, friends of his heard I was going to do this concert,” Suzy said. “He didn’t have a computer or a cell phone, so they brought him to their house so he could watch the concert. The next day I got an email from his friend that said ‘Paul loved your concert. He laughed, he cried, he sang along. Please send me your phone number. He wants to call you.’ The next thing I know the phone rings, and it is that voice on the other end. I just couldn't believe it. And we had four really long, like an hour-and-a-half, intense conversations before he died. And it just meant so much to me that he liked the way I was doing his songs. It meant the world to me.” 

In April of this year she released a new album — Suzy Sings Siebel with 10 songs by Mr. Siebel. Suzy said she was honored to perform with some of her musical heroes as part of the project, among them Molly Mason, Cindy Cashdollar, John Sebastian, and her husband Eric. Ms. Mason and Suzy had played some of Mr. Siebel’s work in their band when they were in their 20s. Suzy had played with Ms. Cashdollar, who has won five Grammy Awards, as side musicians on other people’s projects. And Mr. Sebastian has long held a special place in Suzy’s heart. The first album she bought with her own money was by Lovin’ Spoonful, the mid-1960s folk rock group with Mr. Sebastian that had hits such as “Do You Believe in Magic” and “Summer in the City.”  

Suzy met Mr. Sebastian while she was working on Suzy Sings Siebel. She and Ms. Cashdollar and a group of others went out to dinner in Woodstock, N.Y., where Ms. Cashdollar lives. Mr. Sebastian, whom Ms. Cashdollar knew, came along. 

“I’m seated between John Sebastian on my left and Cindy Cashdollar on my right,” Suzy said. “And Cindy, I will say, had been egging me on to do this project for years. I don’t know that I would have done it without her. She’s elbowing me. ‘Ask him to play on the record.’ So I screwed up my courage and turned to him and asked if he could play some. He said he would be delighted. He did beautiful work. When you get to work with your heroes — I loved his work since I was about 10 years old — that was an incredible piece of good luck and that was due to Cindy. I guess it’s also being in the right place at the right time.” 

That could also apply to her days at Chaffee. 

“I was there at a pivotal time in the school's history,” Suzy said. “My first two years were on the Chaffee campus, the last two on the Loomis Chaffee campus. I found it liberating. ... It meant that we had a much wider range of course offerings, and the campus was so beautiful. And we were given a lot of freedom to explore our intellectual interests, our artistic interests.” 

She said she made friends that she has to this day. Those were turbulent times. “The Vietnam War, Kent State, rioting ... scary times. I think through all of that we bonded with each other,” she said. “And I got a terrific education. I learned how to write well, which stood me in good stead in my adult life. And I learned not to be scared of math. That was kind of a miracle.” 

Suzy sang in the choir in high school and played guitar and fiddle on her own. The quote next to her senior photo in the 1972 yearbook says: “I got me a violin and I make it call the tune.” That quote, she said, is from a Grateful Dead song called “Uncle John’s Band.” The Uncle John referred to in the song is John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, the band that helped open her eyes to the possibilities of the violin.   

“I was a Deadhead in high school,” she said. “This is before they got mega-famous later on in the ’70s. The funny thing is, Eric [her husband] was in a bunch of bluegrass bands with Jerry Garcia before the Dead, and he stayed close with Jerry ’til Jerry’s death. You can hear Eric playing guitar with the Black Mountain Boys on the ‘Before the Dead’ box set.”  

In 2016 Suzy performed on campus with Eric and their daughter Allegra ’06. They also conducted workshops during their two-day stop on the Island as part of an 11-state tour for their group, Thompsonia. 

Performing with Eric, said Suzy, “is kind of like playing with my other half. That said, there are still surprises that happen. It’s kind of amazing that after 50 years of playing music together that there would still be surprises, but there are still surprises. And singing with Allegra is amazing. We have that genetic blend. ... Her singing sounds a lot like mine when I was younger, and we pronounce the words the same way. It is incredibly fun to sing with her.”